Fish Audio raises $50M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises

Palo Alto-based Fish Audio, which specializes in AI-generated voice models, has announced a $50 million seed funding round. The round was led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today, with participation from 359 Capital, Parable, Play Time, Alphalist Partners, Bayhouse Ventures, Carya Venture Partners, and HF0.

Founded by former NVIDIA researcher Shijia Liao, the company started as a small project and has grown to offer a library of over 15,000 natural language controls. Since its launch, Fish Audio has attracted more than 8 million users and generated $21 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company has released five models, three of which are open-sourced, while its latest S2.1 Pro model is available only through a paid API.

Fish Audio offers paid monthly plans for creators and teams, providing a set number of generation minutes and voice cloning features. It also provides an enterprise version of its APIs and platform, with clients including HeyGen, Sanas, and Plaud.

Despite its success, the company has faced issues regarding unauthorized voice uploads. To address this, Fish Audio has automated its content takedown process—users can prove voice ownership and have it removed in under three minutes. However, this does not prevent voices from being uploaded without consent until the owner discovers it.

Coreline Ventures partner Oskue Honda emphasized that a community-driven approach works only if creators trust the platform, calling for verified voice ownership, clear licensing terms, and easy takedown processes. Fish Audio CEO and co-founder Rissa Cao said the company plans to release an audio understanding model soon and is building a speech-to-speech model.

The market is crowded with competitors like ElevenLabs, WellSaid, Cartesia, Speechify, Async (formerly Podcastle), and Krisp. According to Rico Mallozzi, a partner at 359 Capital, fine-grained controls for developers and cost-efficient model training will help Fish Audio compete with larger AI labs.